Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) was created in 1987 originally for UNIX, and was one of the first open-source languages (meaning that the code for the compiler was freely available to anyone). It challenged the UNIX paradigm of the time that said that every tool should do only one thing, and do it well...Perl did many things, and did them better than some of the 'single-use' tools. Today one can program Perl on many platforms and it is commonly used on web sites.